Bill Self: Big 8 Basketball was ‘the Best Days of College Basketball’
As Bill Self wrapped up his final trip to Norman, Oklahoma for a Big 12 battle, the Kansas head coach reminisced on the ever-changing college sports landscape.
Oklahoma is set to leave the Big 12 for the SEC later this year, meaning there’s no telling when these two programs will play each other again. And for Bill Self, while he understands the business behind it, he wasn’t afraid to look back and discuss the heyday of college basketball, at least in his opinion.
Self said, “It’s different now. I’m not saying it’s worse. But the best days of college basketball, we had it better than anybody. And we probably didn’t really we did. We had Billy [Tubbs, OU], we had Larry [Brown] at Kansas, we had Jack [Hartman] at K-State, or Lon [Kruger], we had Norm [Stewart, Missouri], you had Johnny [Orr] at Iowa State, and you go back to [Joe] Cipriano at Nebraska, and coach [Eddie] Sutton at Oklahoma State. That was as good as any league’s ever had it. And I don’t know that we really grasped it at the time. Those guys made this league great.”
Here’s the video of Self.
The Big 12 Conference is currently the best conference in college basketball by most available metrics and should put 9-10 teams into this year’s NCAA Tournament, but what Self is also alluding to there is regionality. And that continues to fall by the wayside as conferences grow by teams and expand their footprint.
Self knows this league all too well, as he played four seasons at Oklahoma State from 1981 to 1985, then started his coaching career at Kansas before joining Eddie Sutton and his alma matter from 1986 to 1993. Self then landed his first head coaching job at Oral Roberts. He then went to Tulsa and Illinois, before taking over the KU job in 2003.
There’s no doubt that while conference expansion has been understandable from a business perspective, the regional rivalries have sometimes been lost across the country. That passion between fans, players and coaches remain strong, in many cases, but can’t top what they were when conferences were smaller.
And from that perspective, it’s hard not to agree with Bill Self.
